News Corsair launches Link-compatible Commander Mini

"Commander Mini. Enough fan power connectors to power your house."

I mean really? I think a computer should have 2 or at most 3 fans, if not your failed your build.
That's how I see it. The exception to the rule are servers, powerful workstation (more then 2 GPUs, or 2 CPUs and such), or extreme OC'ing.

 

I have a Silverstone FT-02, an EVGA GTX780 ACX and a H80i in push-pull. This is 7 fans. Granted two are GPU controlled, but still!

 

Correction to my post. I meant case fans. I assume the CPU heatsink fan like the GPU are plugged to their correct plug on their respective board, which, I believe is the best way to setup things.

 

So you've never heard of liquid cooled systems?

 

Useless. It is louder than high-end air cooling solution, and provides marginal decrease to even none temperatures, on a normal system, even overclocked (not extream OC). A custom water cooling solution is the only setup that shines for multiple processor setup cooling (GPUs + CPU, for example).
But all those pre-build ones, as per review, the difference is marginal, and definitely not worth the premium price, especially that the provided fans with kits are usually not great (noisy).

 

First of all, HUGE sweeping generalisation, and wrong. I had enough rad in my old system to allow me to run all my fans fixed at 5v. The noise level never changed beyond the gentle thrum of the fans at low speed, even when the system was at 100% load.

Secondly, a "custom water cooling setup" is a liquid cooling system.

All in one liquid coolers can be loud depending on the fans - my H100i could get pretty loud with the standard fans at mid to high speeds, but it's barely noticeable with low noise fans and still much cooler than the i30 HSF.

 

There's a second reason to go for liquid cooling rather than air cooling: the practicality of the setup. With something like a Noctua NH-D15, you have to take a look at liquid coolers simply because of ease of installation, as well as stresses involved on the motherboard, especially if you transport your computer (a LAN party for example) with any amount of regularity.

Liquid cooling systems can also often be made smaller than air coolers, which is of great use to mini-ITX builders who are into that sort of stuff.

In addition, almost no liquid-cooling setups interfere with tall RAM, which is an issue with the size of air-coolers these. This is especially useful for LGA2011 builds where you have RAM on both sides, which makes rotating an air cooler utterly useless, and that's something I had to do with my i30 on my Sabertooth Z77 with Corsair Vengeance RAM so the thing would fit. Also flipped the fan round to get "normal" airflow while at it.

In addition, if you pick up something like a Swiftech H220, you can happily add stuff to the loop, and people have done so, cooling two overclocked R9-280s (maybe 290s? can't remember for sure) and an overclocked Haswell chip off just one H220-X. Then again, Swiftech of all companies has a pretty deep interest in you buying waterblocks from them.

...now, if Swiftech could get more of those H220-X kits made faster, that'd be greeeeeat for my Haswell-E build....

EDIT: on a more realted note, the Commander Mini seems to support PWM-controlled fans. Me likey.

 

If this can read the built-in hardware sensors like CPU temps, GPU temps, motherboard temps, hard drive temps (like Speedfan can do), then I'm sold.

Unfortunately, there is no examples/comments in the official documentation about this.

I don't want to deal with thermal probes as the sole source of temp data.

I hate having to rely on random fan control setups on the motherboard. I have an older Asus top-of-the-line motherboard that only has 2 fans that are software controllable. It's just how they built the motherboard.

With this (and the above caveat), then I wouldn't have to worry if the motherboard fan headers are controllable or not. I wouldn't have to worry about fan headers at all for new motherboards.

 

lol.

 

To Coldmist the Link software is good, it has its problems but its not bad. Its a pain to set up but once it is its all good can it can read most of the temps SpeedFan can and you can use it without a commander or other Corsair hardware just to see if it works for you.